by I’m never going back.
Look, I tried to be normal about PC tips, I really did. I bought regular mice, the kind with the gray scroll wheel as their most exciting feature, hoping their budget blandness would help me forget the discomfort I was fighting with them. I ordered fake ones without much customizable weight and adjustable parts, trying to convince myself that a few personal tweaks would help me see the light. When that didn’t work, I paid more than I wanted for a high-end gaming mouse that was jammed with buttons, training myself to hit the most efficient clicks while MMOs disappeared from my life. If all else has already failed definitely, sure, click effectively when my avatar was up to their armpits in space dragons and rabbits to be the thing to finally make a difference, because there was no other type of mice left to try.
I struggled like this for years, always doing something that wasn’t right, always telling myself that this decade was the one that made my wrist suddenly start falling in love with the increasingly expensive little plastic pucks I was shuffling around my too- small workspace.
What else was I going to use, anyway? A touchpad? A stylus? A…
A track ball.
A huge one, specifically. Yes, that’s the name. Yes, it’s hu-really big. Comfy, too. I gave up trying to make my wrists happy with mice and made the switch to a trackball a few years ago, and honestly haven’t given a traditional mouse a second glance since.
Microsoft has released a whole range of these strange upside-down mice over the past few years, each featuring some sort of bright red ball covered in shades of gray with a business issue. They didn’t have customizable RGB lighting or packaging, which boasted a competitive advantage in tough online battles. They didn’t, well, they didn’t look like something you could impress your gaming significant other (or anyone else). They were designed to share desks with organized pen pots, paper clip boxes, and hardcover dictionaries. They looked wise, reserved. They promised comfort. Practicality.
And they were all long since discontinued, probably because they were the accessory computer equivalent of a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. But a few brave souls remain in the track ball camp. Mine is made by Elecom, but the other big names in this little pond are Kensington and Logitech, and there’s also the GameBall store. Old or new, they are all bulbous creatures. Trackballs may be odd and unfashionable, but I sure can make odd and unfashionable. Besides, I was desperate.
Elecom Giant Wireless Trackball | 1500 pso | Wireless
Elecom’s largest trackball has 8 programmable buttons and a scroll wheel, so it can do everything a mouse can (except slide across your desk).
The Internet couldn’t wait to tell me what a bad idea this was as a PC gamer. Trackballs are great for CAD work, but completely unsuitable for gaming, people argue. I wouldn’t be able to react fast enough, and even if I could, that slippery ball wouldn’t give me enough control.
Maybe if I were part of a crazy sports team those questions would rear their heads. But I’m not. I’m playing RPGs and XCOM 2 (again) solo. I’m clicking on elves and aliens and checking their hit percentages, rummaging through inventories for armor and ammo, and constantly being amazed at how well integrated Tactics Ogre Reborn’s cursor support is (seriously – it’s almost strange to think of this console ’90s game never depended on anything else).
My track ball is perfect for me and what I want to use it for. My index and middle fingers rest on the ball and my thumb naturally falls on the left mouse button, which is within easy reach of the scroll wheel. My third finger rests on the right mouse button, and my pinky sits comfortably on a piece of white plastic to the side, unharmed. It’s strangely more portable than any mouse I’ve ever used, because I don’t even need to find a flat surface to use it, but a stable one: like a bed, my foot, and even a very convenient cat sometimes . .
It’s effortless—rolling a trackball is less intuitive than sliding my fingers across a touchscreen—and it’s really not that different from using a regular mouse. Despite what people say, I’ve never missed a pixel sniper shot while using my Giant… at least not because of the hardware I was using, anyway. It’s snappy, it’s sharp. It works. Once I learned how fast and how far to rotate the ball it was just another way to move a cursor around a screen, change my field of view, or focus on something. I’m just using my fingers instead of my hand to do it.
But that’s why it’s so good. I didn’t want to waste decades of muscle memory or spend my weekends creating custom config files for every damn game, I just wanted to find a device that let me handle a typical PC task that I didn’t fill myself and my limbs. with complete sadness.
Trackballs aren’t cool yet and probably never will be, but mine represents everything I love about PC gaming. One of the greatest strengths of a hobby is that it can change itself to suit our own preferences, no matter how big, small or strange they are. This can be reflected in things as small as choosing to play some games sitting on the couch instead of at a desk or as simple as fitting cute custom keys to handmade keyboards.
For me, it’s my trackball. It makes me happy, and if anything ever happens to it I’ll have a little cry and then rush out to buy another one just like it, not giving a single thought to traditional mice. It turns out that my biggest problem with mice wasn’t the type or the branding or the features, it was forgetting that I didn’t need to use one at all. My computer setting is supposed to change to whatever suits me, not the other way around.
